Painted Desert
Oil on canvas, 10x10
Feeling out of step on the reservation, I decide to drive an hour or so west of Gallup and visit the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest. I've visited these places before, and I know how beautiful and alien they are.
I also know how difficult it is to paint these rock and sand formations. I remember struggling, three years ago, to paint them in a way that worked.
So one of the very best parts of this trip is finding that I've learned - or figured out - how to do it! That is a joyful, thrilling discovery.
The hundreds of paintings I've made between then and now, the hundreds of mountains I've painted, the thousands of hours of thought and study and exploration and discovery and failure and success, all these have brought me an ease and a confidence that I never imagined I'd have.
***
Around the Region
All along Interstate 40, from Holbrook, Arizona, to Gallup - and perhaps beyond? - I see Indian stores, selling everything from blankets to kachina dolls to fossils to petrified wood to turquoise jewelry. This sign made me laugh.
A beautiful afternoon. The sky goes on forever here.
I see trailers like these, out in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and I wonder what it would be like to live there. I can only imagine that the people who live in these places run cattle or sheep or something - there's no way they are commuting to a job. Maybe they're just living off the land. They have no neighbors, no fences, no towns anywhere nearby. I can imagine that the nights must be unutterably dark, the sky brilliant with stars.
Above, the view from one of the overlooks in the Painted Desert. Below,
an overlook in the Petrified Forest
***
Dog of the Day
It's Meeka, and she's visiting the Painted Desert with her humans, from California. She reminds me very much of my Jojo, minus a white streak on her nose. Also, Meeka has brown eyes, and Jojo's are blue. But the ears are the same, the nose is the same, the I'm-a-handful-attitude is the same!
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